Demigender

Demigender covers identities in which a person feels a partial connection to a gender: partly a girl, partly a boy, partly androgynous, with the remainder unspecified or absent. The commonest members of the family are demigirl and demiboy, and the umbrella exists mainly to hold them together.

The prefix is the point. Demi- marks degree, not doubt. A demigirl is not a person working out whether she is a girl; she is a person for whom "girl" is accurate as far as it goes and does not go all the way.

Definition & scope

Two neighbouring things get confused with it, and both confusions turn on reading partial as provisional.

The first is questioning, which names a genuinely unsettled position. Demigender identities are settled; what they describe is a stable fraction. The second is bigender, where two full genders are held. In a demigender identity the remainder is not a second gender — it is unnamed, or it is nothing.

The family has internal structure. Demigirl and demiboy are partial connections to woman and man; demiandrogyne to androgyny; demifluid and demiflux combine a stable part with a part that moves, which is where the term meets genderflux. A demigender person may or may not also be transgender: the partial connection can be to the gender they were assigned or to another one, and the two questions are independent.

History & origins

The dated record is unusually good for a term of this kind, because the family reached reference books early.

• early 2010s: the demi- prefix spreads across online gender vocabulary, forming demigirl and demiboy first and the umbrella term afterwards.
• 2016: it appears in a book on raising transgender teenagers; the citation record quotes Stephanie Brill noting that demigender "can be a subset of bigender of multigender, but does not have to be", and that part of the identity may remain stable while other parts are fluid.
• 2018: it enters a clinical training text, with Michael Beattie's Counselling Skills for Working with Gender Diversity and Identity observing in the same record that demigender people often identify as non-binary.
• 2019: Genny Beemyn's Trans People in Higher Education gives the family its standard enumeration — demigirl, demiboy and demiandrogyne.
• 2021: the labels enter large-sample research, with the Trevor Project reporting demigirl at 10% and demiboy at 8% among non-binary youth.
• 2024–2025: the Gender Census promotes demigirl and demiboy to its checkbox list, then removes them the following year — the mechanics of that swing are set out below.

In practice

Because the terms are specific, most demigender people use a broader word in general settings and the precise one where it will be understood. Pronoun practice varies and does not follow from the label: a demiboy may use he, they, both, or something else, and the partiality of the identity carries no implication about which.

Documentation is the usual difficulty. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, records how poorly identity documents track identity in general, and a partial gender has nowhere at all to go on a form with two boxes.

Psychology

There is no research on demigender identity specifically, and the honest position is to say so rather than to generalise from adjacent work. The relevant literature is the broader clinical writing on non-binary genders: Richards and colleagues (2016) describe partial and mixed gender identifications as among the forms non-binary identity takes, and treat them as descriptions rather than diagnoses.

Formal placement is the same as for the rest of the vertical. The DSM-5 diagnoses gender dysphoria — distress — rather than identity, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019.

Prevalence & culture

How common are demigender identities?

Two independent surveys measure the individual labels within non-binary populations, and they agree closely — which is why this entry's derivation is firmer than most in the family, even though no population survey isolates the umbrella.

The Trevor Project's 2021 survey of 34,759 LGBTQ youth found demigirl used by 10% and demiboy by 8% of its 8,998 non-binary respondents. The Gender Census 2024, with 48,645 responses, put demigirl at 7.1% and demiboy at 6% as checkbox options. Taken together the two labels reach somewhere in the range of 13–18% of non-binary respondents, before any allowance for people who use both.

The third row is a measurement artefact rather than a collapse, and the census documents it as such: words score several times higher as checkboxes than as things people have to type, and demigirl and demiboy were moved off the checkbox list for 2025. Applying the checkbox-era share to the Williams Institute's 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ adults — on the order of 0.46% of US adults — gives roughly 0.07% of adults, which is the figure recorded here.